1841 mistranscriptions

[Nick Carver]

I went into my local library where they have an Ancestry account and was browsing the entries for my village (I provide assistance to people hunting relatives here). I was staggered to see the high proportion of mistranscriptions. I'm not casting any blame but merely pointing out to people that if they cannot find their ancestor, do not look for the merely obvious alternative spellings, look for some totally implausible spellings too. I would say that perhaps as many as 25% of entries were doubtful and if you are hunting your ancestors, that is a big obstacle to progress.

So, the moral is that if you cannot find your ancestor, persist with as many variations on spelling as you can imagine.

[kerryb]

Hi Nick

Apparently, so I have heard, Ancestry do a lot of their transcribing by machine hence a lot of the mistakes!

I keep looking for my Terry family in 1891 that I just cannot find.  So far have tried Perry, Lerry, Kerry

Kerry

[suey]

Hi kerry I'm sure I don't need to tell you to try every permutation you can think of, try with just the first name, yob and the County and trawl through.  Look out for anything in the index that looks wrongly spelt or just plain odd .  One of my Knapps was indexed as Korrop

I recently found one of my husbands ancestors using that method but I also had to look at every census page zzzzz tedious but got him in the end.

Suey

[Nick Carver]

It made me wonder if there was any mechanism for saying to Ancestry - look, you have got 50 Draytons in this village but only one family of Dravtons (or suchlike) - could there be a mistake and could it be corrected?

[kerryb]

They do have a system for emailing possible mistakes but I don't know how quick they are to believe you that it is a mistake.  I have submitted quite a few and eventually things get changed!!

Kerry

[downside]

One of the biggest transcription problems I've had is with the name Hiorns.

This has been spelt:

Hiams
Hearns
Harris

The transcribers tend think of a name beginning with the letter H and ending with the letter S.  I've managed to get a few indexes changed, but there are so many of them out there.  I haven't looked at the ancestry.com one as I am not a member.

Will anyone be grateful that we bothered to get them corrected I wonder?


downside

[kerryb]

Downside

I wondered that myself but then thought of the trouble I have had looking for some names and live in hope that I am not the only relative searching for them!!!

Kerry 

[SallyF]

I have to agree.  When I was looking through the 1841 for long gone rellies in Knottingley in Yorkshire, I was amazed at the names that came up, thinking "that can't be right!".

So I had to look at some of the more improbable ones, and as suspected, most were something else completely.  After reporting several, I had to abandon it.

The problem was, I really had no reason to correct them (and it would have taken me ages to correct each family as you have to report each individual), as my only excuse was "just look at it - it's obvious!

So, the good advice to trawl the whole town/village really is good!

Sally

[Nick Carver]

In fairness, I have to say that I was able to go immediately to the name I was looking for. Thanks to Sally for observing that trawling an entire village was good advice. I have to confess that it was purely accidental as that was what I had planned to do in the first place. In a village with 2000 people, you can quickly review the surnames and spot names that do not occur in the parish register. I have to be really sad. Having transcribed the parish registers, I know more about my neighbours' ancestry than they do themselves. There is a guy coming to do some lead repairs on our church roof. He is descended from the splendidly named Gotobed Fenn. How apt for Fenland!